I went out looking for prawns and came home looking like a lobster

So yeah, I did the classic British thing of losing the T-shirt at the slightest sign of sun and got roasted. Good fun day; catching prawns for my friend’s project, lunch on the beach and a quick snorkel. It was a shame the water was still a tad nippy for comfortable head holding under, but i did manage to see my first ever Greater Pipefish in the wild, which was a surprise as I thought they were a bit more tropical. They look like a seahorse that someone has straightened out:



I need aftersun.

The Wrasse that time is going to forget

Ive been in the water for an hour now and the cold is starting to take hold of my movements. My attempts to get the giant ragworm down next to the wreck are becoming more desperate and I curse the small weight on the line for not resisting the pull of the current. I notice a dark shape emerge from the wreck, but its difficult to see with the thousands of plankton blocking my view. A wave washes over my snorkel but i hold my breath as I'm sure the shape must be getting close to the ragworm and I don't want to have to look away...

Ive been doing quite a bit of snorkeling over the summer and starting to really take an interest in the sea life. A friend at work is doing a practical class this year that involves looking at the morphological adaptations of different marine fish skulls. To do this he needs a selection of fish with different feeding habits that he can dissolve the flesh away from in a Quint from Jaws type vat of acid leaving a clean skull.

Big J and I have seen a lot of humongous wrasse while snorkeling, and in a moment of Einstein like foresight I thought that it might be possible to catch them using hand line while in the water. This intuitively seemed like it might be an idea that would prove to be very difficult in practice, so i did a bit of investigation. Googleing "fishing while (snorkeling OR swimming)" gave one or two returns that referred to people having done it, so I felt like it was worth a go.

We went yesterday to Thurlestone, on a low tide, and managed to find the wreck of "The Louis Sheid" in 5 to 10 metres of water.

... Suddenly the shape darts away from the wreck, and i cant quite believe my luck as the line pulls tight and the fish is hooked. The prehistoric looking ragworm was too good an opportunity for Mr Dark Shape to pass by. I wind the line back in, amazed at how the fish's dull pulling of the spool is telling my hand a completely different story to the theatrics and dramatic lunges that my eyes see are going on under the water. The dark shape makes a brave fight of it, and is clearly not happy with the way his day is panning out, or, perhaps more seriously in the longer term of things, his skulls newly acquired destiny.

Back at the car and Mr Ballan Wrasse seems a lot smaller than he did in the sea, maybe 1 and a quarter pounds, but I'm still thrilled at the success of the first fishing-while-snorkeling trip and start thinking of the possibility of tying some mackerel feathers to my fins and going for a swim.

I get home late, put on the TV and am delighted to see its the fantastic 'Tribe' with Bruce Parry. The very next scene is a group of remote Pacific islanders doing some fishing while snorkeling for themselves and cant quite believe the coincidence.

A Rant

Brrrrrr. I'm annoyed.
I'm not really into getting wound up about stuff that doesn't matter, but I have to vent some frustration on the 'Top Dives with Tanya Streeter' programme that was just on BBC2. I first heard about Mrs Streeter a few years ago when a friend said she had broken the mens' world free diving record- and that it was the only world record in which the female record was 'better' than the males. This was quite a cool fact, although Ive just checked and both her records (there were two- the 'Variable Ballast' and 'No Limit' categories) have since been bettered by men.



Anyway, Shes a world champion, and shes hot, so some bright spark decided to give her a presenting job. Unfortunately, for the spark, she is a most annoying person, and while she looks amazing, I found the things she was saying made me swear more than i have in a long time. She was, much like her silver diving suit, so far up her own ass it was painful to watch.

Her general chitchat always started with stuff like, 'when people ask me...' and then went into some self worshiping delusion like 'how I manage to hold my breath and stay calm for so long' or 'if I get scared when I dive so incredibly deep' or 'why I'm such an arrogant posh fucker' and she was grating me with her, 'is it me, or am I just so fucking wonderful' attitude.

Worse of all though she was just so stupid.

At one point they went looking for Whale sharks in the Maldives and while Tanya was looking for a 'pure' encounter, the only one available was with a juvenile (still probably 6-7 meters) that had 10-15 tourists in tow, snorkeling along thinking 'oh my god this is amazing'. They had, like Tanya, been waiting all day for their opportunity to swim with the biggest fish in the sea (I know - I've been on 3 whale shark snorkelling trips and never been lucky enough to see one), and Tanya was fucked off because she couldn't swim with it on her own. Then one of the tourists reached down and touched the sharks dorsal fin. Tanya was distraught. She said it was an 'invasion of space' and a 'crossing of the sacred boundaries between their world and ours'. She was also banging on about how the tourists were chasing the shark, scaring it, and 'not letting it escape'. The next scene she is crying at how fucked off and posh she is.
What a crock.



I agree that the guy shouldn't have touched the shark, but lets get some perspective here. Without the snorkeling tourists, a lot of the sharks would have been killed for their fins. Its because of the tourists and their money that the locals have a high incentive to look after the sharks and their environment. If the odd one gets touched in their conservation, OK, it probably shouldn't happen, but don't cry about it- be glad that this amazing species is still alive (unlike the Yangtze river dolphin, for example). Anyway, that isn't my point. In the next scene Tanya starts going on about how shes wants to 'study the sharks natural behaviour' and eventually they find one that she can swim around and look pretty with. In doing so she swims below and in front of the shark, at one point obviously forcing it towards the surface- something the tourists certainly didn't do. Then she narrates saying that she was careful to always allow the shark to retreat to deeper water, and that the interaction was on the shark's terms, not hers. This was, obviously not what had just been shown. She ends the scene talking about how wonderful she is for emulating the shark with her free diving.

In the end, the icing on her rimtard cake, she swims with sharks. We hear Tanya explaining how she is terrified of sharks, and very nervous about the encounter. With her tears after the whale shark touching incident still fresh in my mind, we see the reef sharks come to investigate her. She panics, freaks out and kicks them away with her fins.

Kicks them away!

Then she does it again! and again! I nearly exploded I was so angry with her. What a colossal idiot. On the boat she got off her high horse, and was like, 'oh i was so scared i just had to get them away from me'. Right, so its OK to lash out at animals, 'breaking the sacred bond', so long as you can justify it by being scared- of a reef shark that dont ever bite people. You could always get out after the first time you fucking airhead.

I hope she drowns.

Not really, obviously. I hope she doesnt make any more TV shows.

Not really, obviously. I hope she only makes TV shows with no sound.

Bring in the lobster pots, Im coming home with crabs.

I learnt to snorkel as a fish-loving child while on my family holiday in Minorca. I remember clinging onto my dad’s hand as I felt a strange sensation of vertigo while watching shoals of sea bream 40 metres below me in the crystal clear waters around Cala galdana. That holiday I went on to see a shark-shaped dogfish (Shock! Ahh Help! No, panic over he’s not coming to eat me), an octopus, and countless other beasties living in amongst the rocks of the shoreline.

Snorkelling has remained a great favourite of mine, but only on holidays in the tropics where the water is warm (and the DVDs are copied). Back in England I always assumed that the sea would be too cold, the water too cloudy, or that the standard of marine beasties on offer would not be up to scratch.

I was wrong.

On Thursday night I went to Wembury with Big J. We arrived, donned our neoprene, and swam out from the beach- our fins enabling thorpedo-like speed through the shallows. The cold on my head seemed severe at first, but then I started to see some fish and I soon forgot about it. Here I was in England, looking at brightly coloured wrasse, shoals of sandeel, gar fish, pollack, mackerel and at least 3 other species that I didn’t recognise. It was amazing.

Big J found a huge edible crab living under a ledge. I dived down and clung to the rocks, the air being the only part of my body wanting to get back to the surface. I watched the crab for a bit, then realised how peaceful it was under the water. Behind me a field of seaweed sloshed forwards and backwards as the waves passed overhead. The rhythm was hypnotic, there was so much seaweed moving together in perfect unison that it made the exposed rocks appear like they were the things moving. I enjoyed confusing my brain and I wished I could hold my breath forever, but quickly realised I couldn’t. We swam on and saw loads of spider crabs, which weren’t scary, despite their large size and likeness of giant spiders. They were so easy to catch that I wondered if they'd make good eating. An investigation of a Lobster Pot showed me my first English Lobster that wasn’t in a restaurant and I was tempted to free her, but didn’t.

We drove home and wondered at the possibilities.